A country programmatically gripped
by fear -- yes, that's us for more than eight years now. Fear of terrorism
to be exact, even as truly terrible things happened in this land and elsewhere,
from hurricane Katrina in 2005 to last week's devastating Haitian earthquake,
which should have put our fears into perspective. But no such
luck.
Since 9/11, the thought of "terrorism"
has seized the U.S. by the throat. People who
are terrified of flying for fear of a terrorist attack are perfectly willing to
drive a car to the nearest mall without a passing worry, even though traffic
fatalities indicate that this is a relatively dangerous act. There were a
staggering 34,000 fatal
crashes in the
U.S. in 2008, 12.25 fatalities for
every 100,000 Americans, and carmakers are now intent on
featuring ever more immersive
Internet-linked "infotainment systems" on dashboards. These are sure to up
the distraction level and lead to more deaths on the highway, and yet the
country is barely focused on this fact. And mind you, despite all the
attention, not one American died in a terrorist attack on an airplane last
year. In fact, Nate Silver of the website FiveThirtyEight.com recently
crunched a few numbers and came up
with the following:
"the odds of being on [a] given [airplane] departure which is the subject of a
terrorist incident have been 1 in 10,408,947 over the past
decade."
But keep in mind that fear, wherever
directed, is a remarkably profitable emotion to exploit. Just think of
those controversial full-body-scan machines now being installed in airports at a
cost of up to $170,000 each. One promoter of them is former Department of
Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Michael Chertoff, "who now
heads the Chertoff Group, which
represents one of the leading manufacturers of whole-body-imaging machines,
Rapiscan Systems." He's part of a growing "full-body-scanner lobby" of ex-Washington politicos just made for
our moment.
Every jolt of terror, in other
words, is a jolt of profit for some company or set of companies. After a
while, those jolts of fear become repetitive adrenaline rushes for a whole set
of interests which, in the American system, soon hire lobbyists, corner senators
and congressional representatives, retain law and publicity firms, and live well
as long as people remain terrified.
If these last years tell us anything,
it's that money follows fear. By 2006, for instance, the Department of
Homeland Security, that second Defense Department, a huge, unwieldy bureaucracy
created from the terror of terror, already had a
mini-homeland-security-industrial complex growing up around it; and that, in
turn, was part of a global security business aimed at "thwarting terrorists"
then worth an estimated $59
billion. (If we had
news media worth their salt and DHS was a real beat, we would undoubtedly have
more recent, far more striking figures for this.)
At the comical (but also profitable) end
of this spectrum of fear were all those
places like Old MacDonald's
Petting Zoo, the Amish Country Popcorn factory, and the Mule Day Parade that
were put into the DHS's National Asset Database as "potential terror targets,"
opening up the possibility that they might receive DHS money to protect them.
"The database," reported the New York Times, "is used by the Homeland
Security Department to help divvy up the hundreds of millions of dollars in
antiterrorism grants each year." Consider just the Weeki Wachee mermaids
at Weeki Wachee Springs in Hernando, Florida. In 2005, the St. Petersburg
Timesreported that the Weeki Wachee staff was "teaming up
with the Hernando County Sheriff's Office to 'harden the target'" -- as they
attempted to access DHS anti-terrorism funds "allocated to the Tampa Bay region." ("'I can't imagine
(Osama) bin Laden trying to blow up the mermaids,' [marketing and promotion
manager John] Athanason said. 'But with terrorists, who knows what they're
thinking. I don't want to think like a terrorist, but what if the terrorists try
to poison the water at Weeki Wachee Springs?'")
All of this might be dismissed as a
joke, if American life weren't filled with phantasmagoric terrors that are also
money machines. Everywhere that fear rules, people exploit it, making
money off it; and it's in the nature of the beast for them to want the
gift-that-never-stops-giving to go on
forever.
